The Fisher King

"The story of the Fisher King begins when the king is a boy,having to spend the night alone in the forest to prove his courage so he can become king. And while he's spending the night alone he is visited by a sacred vision. Out of the fire appears the Holy Grail, the symbol of God's divine grace. And a voice said to the boy, "You shall be keeper ofthe grail so that it may heal the hearts of men." But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life of power, glory, and beauty. And in this state of radical amazement he felt for a brief moment, not like a boy, but invincible, like God. So he reached in the fire to take the grail and the grail vanished, leaving him with his hand in the fire to be terribly wounded.

"Now as this boy grew older his wound grew deeper, until one day life for him lost its reason. He had no faith in any man, not even himself. He couldn't love, or feel love. He was sick with experience; he began to die. One day a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. Now being a fool he was simple-minded; he didn't see a king, he only saw a man alone and in pain. And he asked the king, "What ails you, friend?" The king replied, "I'm thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat." So the fool took a cup from beside his bed, filled it with water, and handed it to the king. As the king began to drink, he realized his wound was healed. He looked in his hands and there was the Holy Grail, that which he had sought all of his life. He turned to the fool and said with amazement, "How could you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?" The fool replied, "I don't know. I only knew thatyou were thirsty"."

The Fisher King (1991), Terry Gilliam, dir.

Ellis Larkins

"You have to have patience, that's the most important thing -- patience with yourself especially. (There's) a tendency to go for yourself and you forget all about the other person." (Ellis Larkins)

Ellis Larkins was a wonderful Jazz pianist with a light touch who worked as an accompanist, most notably for Ella Fitzgerald.

For more about Ellis Larkins check out this NPR profile:
http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/archive/larkins.html

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Larkins

Insufficient Protection Of Crop Diversity Centres Threatens World Food Security

Science Daily - While protected areas such as national parks have been established to conserve charismatic animal and plant species, very few have been set aside to protect wild plants from which our crops originate, a Wold Wildlife Fund report reveals. ... more

Garden State

Tonight I watched Zach Braff's film Garden State for the second time.

It is movie full of beautiful, delicate, hopeful things.

The first time I saw it I came out of the cinema in analytic mode, and analysed it to bits.

This time I realised how not in the spirit of the movie doing that was, and said nothing.

It helped that I only had the dog for company, but I think I would have still savoured it in silence in the company of a more verbal companion.

In happier times

Sometimes I think wistfully that there are people out there who I wish had known me as the happier person I think I am now.

So much of how I am with people depends on what I'm going through at the time, and likewise for them, I suppose.

I suppose understanding that is what leads to the wisdom of second chances should chances for second chances emerge?

Digging

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney, "Digging", Death of a Naturalist (1966)


I used to think that Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging" provided something of a justification for me in my work as an academic, that somehow, perhaps, the craft of being a writer gave me a connection with my relatives and ancestors who have worked on farms, worked with the soil.

After a day of digging I realise that it was something of a romantic notion, the sort of notion that keeps me in mind of something Bertrand Russell said in his History of Western Philosophy, where he commented that there have been very few pragmatist philosophers in the canon of so-called Western philosophy because very few of them ever had to carry a spade. I'll see if I can dig up the exact reference (geddit?).

I did some digging yesterday. I was out helping Paul, the current owner, to lay a water pipe for the house that I am trying to buy.

Digging and writing are very different activities, and, to be honest, I'm not terribly good at digging. I have gone too long in my life without learning how to dig. My body wasn't used to it, or so it tells me a day later. The muscles in my hands are stiff and uncomfortable; there's a blister on my heel; my back is stiff and sore; my shoulder has been pulled. I'm wondering if the last time I dug a hole was with a bucket and spade on a beach as a child? If that's true, it would be a little scary.

While digging I got sweaty and muddy and covered in midge bites. I can't remember the last time that happened while writing.

The spade sounded true when I knocked it against the tree and let it ring out.

My technique improved as I went along, and I kept an eye on what Paul was doing. He knew what he was doing. I didn't. I felt almost embarrassed at my lack of connection to the soil, the inappropriateness of my years of training, my years of experience, for such a basic task as digging a hole in the ground. It is something to learn by doing it more, and there will be plenty more of it to do, I'm guessing.

As I sliced the metal through the turf I wished my grandfathers had been around to show me how to dig.

Seamus didn't have a spade, but it would have been easy enough for him to go out and get one.

In my shed
The sharp and sturdy spade rests.
I'll dig with it
when it makes sense to do so.

Fuzziology and Lifelong Learning

http://www.zulenet.com/see/fuzzilifelearning.html

"Our growth in intelligence and wisdom is hardly compatible with the establishment of rigid mental and emotional patterns. Every fixed idea, prejudice, stereotype and standard in thinking, every pre-imposed emotional or spiritual restriction, every blindly followed behavioral pattern, attachment and addiction decrease our ability to fully experience the journey of life and acts as an obstacle on the way of realization of our creativity. ..."

Vlad Dimitrov and Steve Wilson

From Stuart Hill in Sydney ...

Ask of all action – what is it in the service of? – before supporting or copying it

Work mostly with ‘small meaningful achievable initiatives vs. ‘Olympic-scale projects (most of these are abandoned or fail, & have numerous negative side-effects)

Don’t get stuck in ‘measuring studies’: ‘monitoring our extinction’ – often designed to postpone change perceived to threaten existing power structures

To achieve sustainable progressive change, focus on enabling the ‘good’ agendas of others vs. trying to impose on them your ‘good’ agenda

Focus on enabling the potential of people, society & nature to express itself – so that wellbeing, social justice & sustainability can emerge (in integrated, synergistic ways)

Collaborate across difference to achieve broadly shared goals – don’t end up in a ‘sandbox’
Don’t let ‘end point’/goal differences prevent possibilities of early stage collaboration

Outcomes are only as good & sustainable as the people creating & implementing them – so start with the people; and remember that we are a relational/social species!

Use the media – let me repeat, use the media! – such ‘political’ communication is key

Work with business & the public/community; government will always follow, but rarely lead!

Celebrate publicly at every opportunity – to enable the good stuff to be ‘contagious’

Keep working on & implementing – especially with others – your (shared) benign visions

Most of what is remains unknown – which is what wise people are able to work with – so devote most effort to developing your wisdom vs. your cleverness, which is just concerned with the very limited pool of what is known (Einstein was clear about this!)

So always be humble & provisional in your knowing, & always open to new; take small risks to enable progress and experience transformational learning & development

Devote most effort to the design & management of systems that can enable wellbeing, social justice & sustainability, & that are problem-proof vs. maintaining unsustainable, problem-producing systems, & devoting time to ‘problem-solving’, control, & input management

Work sensitively with time & space, especially from the position of the ‘others’

Act from your core/essential self – empowered, aware, visionary, principled, passionate, loving, spontaneous, fully in the present (contextual) – vs. your patterned, fearful, compensatory, compromising, de-contextual selves

See no ‘enemies’ – only feedback from (indicators of) woundedness, maldesign & mismanagement – everyone is always doing the best they can, given their potential, past experience & present context – the last two are the most important things to work with

Be paradoxical: ask for help & get on with the job (don’t postpone); give when you want to receive; give love when you might need it, or when you might feel hate

Learn from everyone & everything, & seek mentors & collaborators at every opportunity

Links:

Stuart Hill

Social Ecology at UWS

Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting...

A small striped sleeve in her lap,
navy and white,
needles carefully whipping in yarn from two sides.
She reminds me of the wide-angled women
filled with calm
I pretended I was related to
in crowds.

In the next seat
a yellow burst of wool
grows into a hat with a tassel.
She looks young to crochet.
I'm glad history isn't totally lost.
Her silver hook dips gracefully.

And when's the last time you saw
anyone sew a pocket onto a gray linen shirt
in public?
Her stitches must be invisible.
A bevelled thimble glitters in the light.

On Mother's Day
three women who aren't together
conduct delicate operations
in adjoining seats
between La Guardia and Dallas.
Miraculously, they never speak.
Three different kinds of needles,
three snippy scissors,
everybody else on the plane
snoozing with The Times.
When the flight attendant
offers free wine to celebrate,
you'd think they'd sit back,
chat a minute,
tell who they're making it for,
trade patterns,
yes?

But a grave separateness
has invaded the world.
They sip with eyes shut
and never say
Amazing
or
Look at us
or May your thread
never break.

Naomi Shihab Nye (with permission)

Anti-Oppressive Social Work

"This book is aimed at assisting practitioners to achieve the goal of providing more relevant services to clients whose life experiences have been shaped by the forces of oppression. That is, it focuses on those who are excluded from realising their creative potential as a result of the disadvantaging contexts that they contend with daily. It seeks to go beyond the additive approach to oppression whereby each social division, be it class, 'race', gender, age, disability or sexual orientation, is considered separately from the others while the effects of each different form are 'added on' to the one initially under consideration. At the same time, it asks social workers to understand that being oppressed is only one aspect of a reality that both they and their clients are embedded within. In other words, the people that they are working with may be playing key roles in oppressing others. And, moreover, they as social workers may be oppressed themselves whilst both oppressing and attempting to empower people at the same time. In taking this more complex theoretical position, this book attempts to go beyond the formulations of oppression implied by authors such as Thompson (1993) in his well-known PCS (personal, cultural and structural) model, where a focus primarily on discrimination, I would argue, emphasises only one element in the web of oppressive social relations.

"Moreover, the additive approach to the complexities of oppression casts the resolution of conflict, in both intellectual and practical terrains, in competitive terms resulting in a winner and a loser. This approach tends to be unhelpful in that it usually produces an unstable outcome whirling around an ever-extending spiral of conflict in which the losers seek to become the winners while those in the ascendancy attempt to (re)entrench their position. Moreover, additive approaches rank oppressions in a hierarchy that prioritises one form over another. I intend to transcend the problematics of a competitive approach to resolving the contradictions that surround various forms of oppression in social work practice by developing a holistic framework that enables users to play a greater role in the design and delivery of the services they require and professionals to respond more appropriately to the agendas that they set."

Lena Dominelli, Anti-Oppressive Social Work Theory and Practice (2002)

Wendell Berry on local food economies

Thanks to Brett Nelson for this ...

Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 11, 2007 www.startribune. com/commentary/ story/1295268. html
http://www.startribune.com/commentary/story/1295268.html

Wendell Berry: Food and Consequence

Wendell Berry is a celebrated author, an advocate of sustainable agriculture and himself a small farmer in Kentucky. He was in the Twin Cities recently to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Land Stewardship Project, a Minnesota nonprofit that supports small farmers and environmental stewardship. He spoke with editorial writer Dave Hage.

Q A few years ago, in an essay about globalization and the economics of food, you coined the phrases "total economy" and "local economy." Can you explain what you meant?

A Yes. The total economy is an economy in which people do nothing for themselves. It's an economy in which they pay for everything; they are total consumers. A local economy is one that exists by virtue of people's willingness to take back a certain amount of economic initiative and do things for themselves. It's a way to recapture economic choice. It's self-determination.

Q Do you see our society today in a struggle between those two?

A It's not a struggle yet, but there is a movement toward the local economy. And it's coming about as a response to people's understanding of the costs to the world of an economy based entirely on long-distance transportation. They say that the average distance that food travels from the field to the dinner plate is 1,500 miles. And this has a cost in fuel depletion and pollution. It's a part of the permanent drawdown of necessary resources that are the basis of an industrial economy.

Q There's a good deal of talk today about community-based agriculture and buying local. Is this significant?

A Well, it's the most reasonable thing going on in agriculture. To shorten the distance as far as possible from the farm to the dinner plate just makes sense. But it also begins to elevate food in human culture back up to where it ought to be. We've allowed it to decline from a kind of sacrament and a kind of center of conviviality, through commodification, to a kind of stuffing.

Q But some people would say, gee, I like having fresh tomatoes in January, even if they come from Mexico. Does this mean Minnesotans would get fresh tomatoes only in July?

A Yes, but it also means you like them better. (Laughs) Of course people like to have things out of season. It's part of the general culture of self-indulgence. If you want a raspberry, why shouldn't you have a raspberry? But the present economy doesn't give people any idea of the true cost involved. So, yes, you want the raspberry. The question is do you want to pay the cost‹in pollution, in the drawdown of resources, in the damage to the environment?

Q You've been writing for a long time about sustainable agriculture. Do you think the concept is gaining ground?

A Yes, no question. The concept is gaining ground. But it's still a losing side. I mean, who's for it? Where are your champion politicians who are willing to talk about sustainability? I saw Al Gore's movie‹there's nothing in that movie about sustainability. The assumption is that we can keep on living the way we're living in an economy that is necessarily destructive and wasteful, yet somehow make adjustments to keep the glaciers intact. I think we've got to face the possibility that the industrial economy is essentially destructive.

Q Would that mean going back to the kind of life that our grandparents led‹where you can your own vegetables and don't fly on airplanes?

A Canning vegetables is not a bad idea, and it's not a difficult science. So, yes, that's a possibility. But we're not going back to anything. That's not a possibility. Our grandparents lived the way they did because they knew how, and they were by and large far more skillful than we are and had better use of their own minds than we do. But we can't be them.

Q Absent leadership from the public sphere, what can an individual do to bring about a sustainable economy?

A Well, it's fairly limited. There's none of us without sin on this‹my wife and I own two vehicles. We live in the country; we have different duties in different directions. That's just the way it is. It would make sense in a lot of ways if we didn't have any vehicles, but the fact of the matter is that my great-grandfather had better public transportation than I do‹true!But individuals can learn something about their food economy. And the first thing they learn is how extraordinarily difficult it is to learn anything about it. If you wanted to find out where your December head of lettuce came from and what it cost, to the people and the land it came from, you'd have a hard time. So the next thing they ask, if they can't find out much about the mainstream food economy, is where can I find food that I can learn about? And that's your local food economy: Where can I find a farmer who could sell me a quarter of beef? Where can I find a farmer's market? How can I join a local community-supported agriculture enterprise? Or where are the restaurants that buy from local farmers? Those questions, nearly everywhere in the United States, now have answers.

Giving a talk in London in September

Just a heads-up that I'll be giving a talk in London on the 9th September at the Brahma Kumaris University. I'll be giving it in company with Dadi Janki, and it's going to be called, 'The Celt and the Yogi - Ancient and Contemporary Wisdoms for Everyday Life' or something like that.

I'll be looking at some of the ways that people look to Celtic Spirituality and Celtic Archaeology for spiritual guidance. While there are some interesting ideas floating around in these areas, I will be suggesting that lots of the people writing about that stuff may well be building castles of unsubstantiated rhetoric, along the Spinal Tap lines of

"In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, an ancient race of people ... the Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing ..."

But hey, let's pretend that we do.

I have difficulty enough trying to work out what my neighbours think, never mind trying to reconstruct the wisdoms of people who died an awful long time ago.

I will make the point that we are probably a lot better off looking closer to home, working out the helpful intentions we might have in turning to Celtic Spirituality, and working to identify and learn from the presence of gentleness in the lives of those who live around us, instead of clambering for wisdoms 'elsewhere' or 'elsewhen'.

Cat-bathing as a martial art

"Know that although the cat has the advantage of quickness and lack of concern for human life, you have the advantage of strength. Capitalize on that advantage by selecting the battlefield. ..."

For more:

http://www.joke-archives.com/cats/catbath.html

Under the Tuscan Sun

I just watched Under the Tuscan Sun, the Diane Lane movie based on the book of the same name by Frances Mayes. Yes, it's sentimental, but adequately so for a guy who's buying an old house in the countryside (me). I'm left with the lines, spoken by the character Martini:

"Signora, between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. It is an impossibly steep, very high part of the mountains. They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come."

Wedding thoughts

No, not mine. Another sister is getting married this coming Monday.

I proposed to someone once. It was a really big moment for me. I'd had a long chat with my Dad about it. I saved up for the ring, looked for a long time before I found the one I wanted, or rather the one I thought that she might want; not too ostentatious but simple, delicate, tasteful, slim like her, sparkly like her. I approached the moment thoughtfully, searched my heart to work out if I was confident about what I was doing. I was terrified, but confident that we loved each other.

I considered whether I could imagine myself waking up with that person every day of my life, and found myself excited by that very prospect. Every day, waking up to the unfolding wonder of another person's daily renewed encounter with their world with me in it. Every day another chance to learn to live in respect, another chance to let the extraordinary magnitude of that particular person's reality take my breath away with the most ordinary of glances, the most mundane of movements, the most amazing presence of just being there. The prospect that every day there would be that particular someone close by who would listen to me and I to her. The prospect that there would be someone close to hand who would have my best interests at heart, who would help me be the person that they could see I could be, even when I lost faith in myself, as I sometimes do. The prospect that I could share my life with someone I almost never needed to explain myself to, someone who could see me in all my meness. The prospect that every day there would be someone nearby with whom the notion of raising a family was an amazing, exciting possibility. I believed I had found someone whose baseline was gentler than mine, someone who I believed would default to loving, caring, and nurturing whenever crankiness moved on, whenever clouds would pass, lightning cease, and the rain stop falling. Far from an ideal, the relationship was extraordinarily ordinary for me - real, possible, already happening.

The offering of one's whole self lovingly, the invitation to someone that they walk with you in joy and sorrow, contentment and anxiety, is something that you never forget, and something that I myself can carry with me as a testament to the possibilities of loving. To invite oneself to the gentleness of a truly loving reality is a truly wondrous and truly scary thing to do. To invite another? I don't know what it felt like from her side, but I can't allow myself to regret asking.

It was a long time ago, but looking back on that moment I know that there can indeed be times when I can work out with clarity what's important to me in my life and proceed into the unknown with the courage that comes with knowing, whatever happens, that everything is going to be okay. Even if the okay that everything is may not be quite as I expected, and may be quite a while in making itself known.

It wasn't a proposal of marriage. I am well aware of the weight that comes with the idea of marriage, the distant (and sometimes not so distant) echoes of property and patriarchal authority, the state- and church-sanctioned positioning. I didn't want her to marry me. I wanted the person in question to accept an invitation to walk with me, to walk with me as my family and I as hers. That was as open an invitation as I could offer. I kept it short, but I said what I wanted to say.

I never got an answer, as it happens. At least, not a verbal one. What became clear very quickly was that, whatever about the care I took in framing it as an unmarriage proposal, a carefully selected engagement ring is a powerful force that can unleash a maelstrom of contradictions, a damburst of dreams and nightmares, an audit of conversations spoken and unspoken. Nothing says 'Marriage and everything that goes with it' more than an engagement ring. I wouldn't have wanted it so, but I couldn't do anything about it once the box was opened.

I'm not a terribly practical man, I'm more than a little impulsive. But being honest with someone about where my heart is at is something I will never regret. I have a good friend who suggests that it's wise not to tell someone you love them unless they tell you first. I can appreciate the thought. It can be a scary line to throw at someone these days. But life's too short to clamp your heart shut when all you want to do is celebrate the person you love. And anyway, if I say 'I love you' to someone it shouldn't come as much of a surprise by the time I get around to saying it! I had hoped as much with the proposal, but it didn't turn out that way.

The lack of definite response challenged me to work out for myself the difference between plans and hopes. I had hopes that I thought we had both woven in encounter with each other, in exploration of each other, in loving each other. They weren't plans or prescriptions. I didn't even think they were hopes of my own devising. I thought they were merely invitations that we had quietly offered to each other along the way, threads that I thought we had worked at enough, woven enough to carry the weight of love, faith, trust, and a lifetime of working it out and working it through as you go along. Apparently she didn't agree. It happens.

Hopes are wonderful things when they whisper quietly and keep close to the ground. Maybe it's difficult for an engagement ring to whisper? Maybe it's difficult for a proposal of marriage to be gentle? I really don't know any more. I do believe that we can live invitations for each other, as friends and lovers, to become less fearful people, and I do believe that a committed partnership can (but in certain cases may not) offer safe places for us to learn ever more immediate and helpful ways to live with our fears, to dissolve our fears, and to face ourselves.

I worked hard at that particular relationship after the proposal, but whether I liked it or not the proposal had changed everything, and I couldn't take it back. Time eventually spoke loud enough for both of us. As the song says, "Time was talking/Guess I just wasn't listening/No surprise, if you know me well" ("The Kid", Buddy Mondlock). It has been a few years now since I proposed. We are no longer in contact, and I imagine we are both living our lives the best that we know how.

I've been thinking recently about what loving someone means, particularly the couple of people with whom I have been truly, passionately loving in my life in the extraordinarily ordinary way that I aspire to. If what I am working at is to be loving rather than 'in love' (see bell hooks' All About Love), then it's about an attitude I craft, not a flush of chemicals that I undergo.

Just because a person moves out of my life, then, doesn't mean that I get to shirk the responsibility of trying to be loving towards them. It means very practically that I don't get the opportunity to work at being loving with them, in company with them, on a daily basis, especially if, to the best of my knowledge, they continue to hate me or want nothing to do with me. Nevermind that they might live too many miles away to make it likely that we might ever bump into each other by accident. I still get to work at respecting them, to try to get to the point where the anger that we generated together is dissolved in my heart to become respect for where they happen to be, with whom they happen to be, how they happen to be. Who knows if time will talk any of us into being friends again? It takes a special alchemy for that to happen. There are days when I do believe in alchemy.

If you love someone, as the saying goes, let them go. If you are loving someone, let them be. As the anger, the hurt, the regret, the tragedies of the otherwise dissolve, so the possibilities for moving on open up. To sit with the anger, the hurt, the regret is to sit 'elsewhere', to disrespect what happens to be happening now, here, to de-presence myself, in that sense. And it's to disrespect the person (the people) with whom I once had a loving relationship, to reduce my relationship with them (now) to the arrogant distortions of my own personal versions of my memories of their (according to me) more toxic selves. People are more majestic than that, and I once esteemed the people I have felt aggrieved by to be more majestic than most, more worthy of my attentions, more likely to let me feel more alive.

To disappear down the boree hole of tortuous romantic past-lives is to suspend myself in webs of my own internal conversations. No need for me to do so. I can acknowledge my take on what has happened in my life, and I can celebrate those times in relationship, like the proposal, where I think I did well. And I can stand in that place of celebration and really appreciate the courage and love with which my sister and her beloved are walking forth together, working forth together, dreaming forth together. I wish them well, and wish them love, with every blessing.

And as I stand and celebrate them, I will also, with respect, celebrate the woman to whom I once proposed, and wish her well, and wish her love, with every blessing.

Memo to self

Just because I have photos packed away somewhere doesn't mean it's a good idea to take them out and look at them.

I would like to request that my nostalgia chip be removed.

What makes sense

"We make choices in great measure based on how we see the world. If you see the world in a particular way, it can make some sort of sense to sell your life to a job you do not love. Otherwise no one would do it. Similarly, there are lenses you can look through that make it seem reasonable to deforest. There are lenses through which it makes sense for child abusers to abuse, and for rapists to rape: there are reasons these people make the choices they do. It is possible to perceive the world such that you choose to drop bombs on people from 30,000 feet, and it is possible to perceive the world such that you choose to pay for those bombs. It is possible to perceive yourself and others such that it makes sense to destroy the planet in order to make money and amass power, to perpetuate and make grow an economic system. None of this is to say these are wise choices: it's to say they're choices. It's also to stress, once again, how often unquestioned assumptions frame our choices. If we wish to make different choices we must smash the frames that constrain us. We must, if we care about our own lives, and if we care about the life of the planet, begin to remember how to think critically, how to think for ourselves."

Derrick Jensen, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution (2004)

http://www.derrickjensen.org

Into Their True Gentleness

Into Their True Gentleness
For Katherine Kavanagh

If love is the greatest reality,
and I believe it is,
the gentle are more real
than the violent or than
those like me who
hate violence,
long for gentleness,
but never in their own act
achieve true gentleness.

We fall in love with people
we consider gentle,
we love them violently
for their gentleness,
so violently we drive them to violence,
for our gentleness is
less real
than their breaking patience,
so falsely we accuse
them of being false.

But with any luck,
time half-opens our eyes
to at least a hundredth
part of our absurdity,
and lets them travel back
released from us,
into their true gentleness,
even with us.

Pearse Hutchinson

The transformations that await us

"The transformations that await us cost everything in the way of courage and sacrifice. Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other."

Mary Caroline Richards, Centering: in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (1962)